North Carolina broadband bill would eliminate level playing field

Op-ed: In this guest editorial, Josh Levy of Free Press argues that a bill …

Op-ed: In this guest editorial, Josh Levy of Free Press argues that a bill that would ban the construction of new municipal broadband networks would stifle competition and make it tough for existing municipal networks to survive.

Michelle Kempinksi lives in Cedar Grove, North Carolina, a township of about 2,000 on the fringes of Orange County. The county is home to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and thousands of plugged-in residents enjoying the benefits of high-speed broadband. In Cedar Grove however, life is a different story.

Kempinski is a landscape architect. Like others in her field, she uses complex AutoCAD (a 3D design program popular with engineers) and GIS (geographic information system) applications to produce and move around big files used to map and build in physical spaces.

She started in her own business in 2004—just as people started using the Internet to e-mail large files to each other, rather than sending each other bulky CDs in the mail. For Kempinski, the transition from CD to e-mail wasn't so easy. "Any time I try to collaborate, there's always large files that need to be transferred between firms," she said. "GIS applications, other CAD documents, governmental forms, everything is online."

Everything being online was a problem, because Kempinski’s corner of Orange County lacks dependable access to high-speed Internet. North Carolina’s two biggest cable providers, Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink, don't provide service to Cedar Grove, so Kempinski and her neighbors must make do with notoriously fickle wireless broadband cards. Until she purchased an additional antenna to improve reception, Kempinski would consistently lose her Internet connection every five minutes. And once the antenna was in place, she still dealt with slow speeds that made it impossible to send the big files that were her business' bread and butter.

"The assumption is that everyone has access, so the files get larger and larger over time," Kempinski says about her field. After a few years, the technology had advanced to the point that she couldn't access online GIS mapping tools at all. It was like a carpenter working without a hammer.

Earlier this year, Kempinski had to make a hard decision. "With the economic crisis and housing bubble bursting, combined with the inability to broaden out to other areas and compete in a larger geographic area, I had to end the business," she says. Without high speed broadband, she couldn't compete.

Kempinski is not alone. Millions of people across the country lack access to broadband Internet because big companies like Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink and AT&T don't find it profitable to reach into their areas. And even those with access to those services often find them unreliable or too expensive. The result of this lack of access to affordable high-speed broadband is more stories like this: businesses that can't compete, students who struggle to get online, and entire communities that are left behind.

In response to this neglect, several North Carolina communities have built their own broadband networks, offering high-speed broadband connections for a better price than their corporate competitors—if they have any. But the state legislature just passed a bill that would outlaw new municipal networks and strangle existing ones.

The legislation is the doublespeak-filled "Level Playing Field/Local Government Competition Bill (H129)," which would in fact create an unequal playing field and eliminate competition by restricting the cable market to existing cable companies, hamstringing some municipal networks so much that they’ll find it tough to stay alive.

Over the last few years, municipal networks like Salisbury's Fibrant have entered markets that have seen no or little competition to date. Suddenly, residents in these communities are being offered real choices based on cost and speed, rather than having to settle with the only cable game in town.

Predictably, the big cable companies view these municipal upstarts as major threats. Companies like Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink may be unwilling to extend their networks to communities like Cedar Grove, but they don't want anyone else doing it either—such an incursion would pose a threat to North Carolina’s de facto cable duopoly. Ironically, the weapon these traditionally regulation-shy companies have turned to in order to fight the municipal broadband effort is regulation.

Phillip Dampier, who runs the broadband news site Stop the Cap!, has argued that the legislation "would micromanage community-owned broadband networks right down to the streets they would be allowed to deliver service. Those terms, perhaps unsurprisingly, would not apply to the state’s largest cable and phone companies." Time Warner Cable has been the foremost proponent of the bill, lobbying for it heavily throughout the state.

If passed, the "Level Playing Field" bill would put an end to efforts to create municipal broadband systems in North Carolina, making it financially impossible for municipalities to start new projects and restricting current networks from growing beyond their present size. Catharine Rice, president of SEATOA, a four-state community broadband and PEG association, who has been leading the charge against this and similar bills that have been brought before the state legislature, argues that limiting growth in this way is "the best way to shut a business down." This appears to be Time Warner Cable’s intention.

The bizarre legislation is heavily weighted to the interests of the incumbent telecoms, and boasts a champion in Rep. Marilyn Avila, who cites the need to protect taxpayers as the main impetus behind the bill. "This particular issue," she told Raleigh's WRAL, "is that municipalities' core services are being damaged by this particular approach in getting into the business world and committing the responsibility for that success or failure to a very finite group of people."

But those who run these municipalities beg to differ. The town of Chapel Hill, which has begun work on its own broadband network, recently passed a resolution “urging members of the General Assembly and Governor Perdue to oppose” the bill. Mayoral-Aide Mark F. McCurry said, “The Town of Chapel Hill is in the process of installing a high speed fiber optic network in town. The Council is very concerned about the restrictions the broadband bill would place on the Town’s investment.”

Even the cities unaffected by the bill are opposing it. Doug Paris, the assistant city manager for the city of Salisbury—one of the five communities in North Carolina with existing municipal networks that, thanks to amendments to the bill, won’t be eradicated by H129—is also critical of the bill.

Anyone who wants to invest in infrastructure should be allowed to do so,” he says. “There are areas in North Carolina where there are some access issues, where you can only get Internet via satellite. The opponents of this bill feel that these people will be left behind. The industry has not served it in the past—that's the track record, and the track record says a lot. Those folks may need a public-private partnership or a co-op or to petition their local government to provide them with broadband service.”

Rural areas like Cedar Grove, which have no access to cable broadband at all, won’t be served by the municipal systems in question. Most of rural North Carolina is too geographically dispersed, and the towns are too small, for these networks to serve them. In those cases, co-ops have sprung up to connect disparate networks and offer connectivity to folks living hundreds of miles from city centers, or even each other.

Despite these differences, a bill restricting new broadband networks would have damaging consequences in the long term. Wally Bowen, the founder and executive director of the Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN) in Asheville, argues that while nonprofit and co-operative networks are not subject to this specific bill, "if [legislators] are successful in prohibiting municipal networks, nonprofit networks could be next." Municipal and rural networks work together to provide broadband to citizens across the state, he says. If one of these networks is threatened, it’s only a matter of time before legislators go after the others.

Bowen says the effort to connect rural citizens has made real progress, though there is much work to be done.

The passage of H129 could end all that before it even begins, creating a political climate in North Carolina in which incumbent telecoms like Time Warner Cable call the shots, bullying legislators into opposing any attempt to build public or nonprofit networks.

As a result, people like Michelle Krempinski would lose all hope of getting real broadband connections to their homes, and of reviving businesses dependent on connections to 21st century networks.

Despite massive public opposition to the bill and tireless organizing by people like Catharine Rice, H129 passed both the House and the Senate in the North Carolina General Assembly. It now sits on the desk of Governor Bev Perdue, who has until May 20 to decide whether to sign or veto it. If she vetoes, it goes back to the Assembly, which can override the veto with a two-thirds majority.

Advocates like Rice believe that the passage of H129 would be a lose-lose situation: Existing and future municipal networks would suffer, and rural residents would lose hope of one day gaining access to dependable, and globally competitive broadband. In a world in which access to information has attained the status of a basic right, we should be outraged that these cable companies—and their conspirators in the North Carolina State Assembly—are able to get away with this.

Josh Levy is the online campaign manager at Free Press, a national, nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to reforming the media.